Photo Journal: Old Sturbridge Village
I know, this is not my typical photo journal, but I couldn't just throw up some pictures of Sturbridge Village without writing a bit about it too.
Bo, myself and his friend Kent took a detour to Old Sturbridge Village on our way back from Bo’s reunion in June. It was a pit stop that Bo had been talking about forever. I’d never been to Colonial Williamsburg or any other historic village. But he knew I loved costumes, and cute houses and old things, so he persuaded a fellow alum to let us stop there on our way back from the reunion.
The village is as thus: a bunch of old houses from across New England, along with a church, a general store, a farm, and a sawmill. The majority of buildings were clustered around a main street, where an old horse and carriage circled frequently. The costumed employees were mostly “in character.” Though they were of this day and time, I gasped at the first one I saw, sitting in her house, making a straw hat. She explained that she didn’t have money, and that she was making straw hats to sell in town for five cents a piece. She showed us her bed, all stuffed with straw. She had wallpaper, the cheap kind. The rich people down the street could afford stenciled, hand painted wall paper, she explained.
Animals roamed wild in the town. Baby goats trotted past us in groups (their mother, bleating angrily from her pen) and a pheasant nonchalantly walked by. We met the ministers wife and daughter. They were knitting by the window.
After that we visited the town lawyer and the tinsmith, who Kent had a discussion with that led to the the presentation of a very previous French tin making manuscript. Bo wanted to wander on, so we went to the further areas of the town, to see a sawmill and a blacksmith.
The tinsmith.
Bo and I stuck our heads into a preserved 1810 schoolhouse. There was a group there, sitting on the benches, listening to a woman in costume give a speech. They all turned to me.
An older man smiled.
“Join us,” he said.
“Well, we would but, our friend just ran off with the Tinsmith,” said Bo.
“Oh!” exclaimed the man. “He’s a hard one to catch.”
“So we must go,” Bo said. The man nodded back as if to say, “Obviously.”
I added that exchange to my “Favorite Dialogue” list.
We exited the schoolhouse, deposited back on the dusty roads of Sturbridge Village. We walked up through the hills. We were the last guests when the gates were shut. I managed to leave with a half a pound of peanut butter fudge homemade from the village.
